1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for providing data upon anonymizing or generalizing information about privacy in order to allow secondary usage of the data.
2. Description of the Related Art
With various kinds of progress made in information technology such as cost reduction of storages, increase in the capacities of storages, establishment of networks, and widespread use of portable information terminals, the amount of accumulated information is increasing in an explosive manner, and there is an increasing movement toward the use of so-called big data. However, among the big data, secondary usage of information about individuals is required to be used upon protecting the privacy. For example, JP-2012-3323-A “personal information disclosure support apparatus, method, and program” discloses a method for protecting the privacy by controlling a disclosure level by deriving the reliability of a recipient of the disclosure by the user on the basis of the number of accesses to a web site and management information in a case where personal information is disclosed.
When personal information is simply deleted or an ID for identifying an individual is simply replaced with another ID, there is a risk that a person may be identified by combining conditions. Therefore, k-anonymization method is known as a method for more securely protecting the privacy. In the k-anonymizationmethod, the original data are generalized so that at least k or more data having the same condition are configured to exist in a combination of designated data field types. (See K. Harada, Y. Sato and Y. Togashi, “Reducing Amount of Information Loss in k-anonymization for Secondary Use of Collected. Personal Information,” Proc. of SRII Global Conference 2012, pp. 61-69.)